Many things found on the Internet are of low quality, false, or dangerous. Web surfers are often asked to make decisions of trust with little or no background information. To address this problem, a wide variety of Internet entities provide reputation ratings for sellers of products or services, reviews of products or other items, or both. Broadly speaking, such data about other data may be termed “metadata.” For example, AMAZON.COM provides reviews of products written by other customers and reputation ratings for sellers who partner with AMAZON.COM. The AMAZON.COM product review system also allows customers to indicate whether a given review was helpful or not.
Though useful, conventional metadata systems are only as trustworthy as the people submitting the opinions. Unfortunately, those individuals are generally complete strangers to the computer user. Even if the user knows where on the Internet to find information from a trusted source on a particular topic, that information is not automatically presented to the user in the relevant context.
Conventional metadata systems fail to take into account that people generally make decisions based on the advice of a relatively small number of known, trusted friends or experts, nor do they automatically present such information to the user when a relevant context arises. It is thus apparent that there is a need in the art for an improved method and system for incorporating trusted metadata in a computing environment associated with a computer user.